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Something new…

I just wanted to write a post about the three hours it took me to teach a colleague how to publish videos on the intranet (and that only covers half of the work), and about that I’m looking forward to calculating a business case for the new solution we’ve been discussing for more then a year.

This morning, I got the amazing news: My project has been approved by the management board. We will build a new intranet. I started to work on the first proposals in November 2007  – so that were really really long discussions.

Now it’s signed; the main requirements we want to meet are:

• build a portal that’s accessible for everybody from every country we’re operating in
• introduce publication processes that talk with one voice to everybody (same content, same time, all audiences)
• introduce permission management and closed usergroups where necessary
• introduce group-personalisation to create different views on the content for different audiences
• enhance the corporate directory towards an enterprise network
• carefully introduce well planned blogs and microblogs with attractive authors
• provide wikis as collaboration-, documentation and knowledgemanagement tools (knowledgemanagement projects are running in parallel)
• use tags as additional navigation- and categorisation tools, introduce rss for easier and for flexible customization
• support and train employees especially with increasing their media literacy

Detailed planning will continue now, I will keep posting and I’m looking forward to comments and discussions.

Applied collaboration – dont always blame me

Image by Pirkka2 via Flickr

I just came back from vacation and there are not so many but still far too many emails asking for things that should not have waited for me. “Could you fix this, do you know how to do that, what’s the name of the guy who works with…” – I’m not the only person around who knows this, but I’m probably the one whom others suppose to know this. There are a lot of colleagues whom you could ask, and I bet you can find a lot of the requested information in the blogs, wikis and other information sharing services I’m running.
I like the idea of collaborating not only in dedicated collaboration environments, but also – or rather way more – in environments that strongly support networking. Yes, information should be tailored to a certain audience – but everybody should have the possibility to be part of that audience.
Public information provides better accessibility, not only of the information itself, but also of the possibilities and responsibilities: Who did what? Who can fix what? Who knows what? I don’t want to skip hierarchies or substitute managers, I’m mainly thinking about intra-team collaboration: Some colleagues have a sense for what’s going on, others simply don’t. They always need help and guidance, especially if they are supposed to get in touch with people they don’t have to deal with every day.
And that quickly leads to fear, prejudice, stubbornness – which again reduces the quality of information. Actually it even reduces the readiness to look for any information at all.

We know the consequences: Colleagues start to blame each other, questions are understood to be suspicions and wrong information becomes harder and harder to fix – you start to believe in things you know just because you know them, and because it seems to be more comfortable than questioning them.

And maybe the colleagues who asked so many questions during my vacation did not want to blame me… , but they really just needed to know something.

What’s the end of it: Collaboration does also stand for networking and documentation; collaboration tools should also provide information on who did what. Or the other way round: every tool that is of value for the community or is used by a community should provide collaborative features that

• provide public information
• show who did what and who can be addressed for what
• are easily accessible and not just an administrator’s secret.

Then we can clearly say that collaboration adds tremendous value to media.

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Applied blogging – why the hell should we blog pt 2

Image via Wikipedia

I talked to a friend yesterday about presenting and spreading new ideas among and audience that is interested, but not yet really ready for it. They are not into the topic , they want something new but they are rather sceptic.

“You should not think about something new, something original”, said my friend. “That challenges people too much – and it’s too much work to shape your idea in a clean and neat way, make it bulletproof and let others try do destroy it.” Is that just lazyness and too much recycling? On the other hand: if your idea is good enough to be made bulletproof, if you spend all that work and time on it – then you should try to sell it.

“I think it is way smarter”, said my friend, “to summarize and comment what others did. There are so many ideas around, famous ideas, and professional thinkers – there is enough to build on. And most people did not get it anyway, the more you repeat it and the more examples and relations you build – the higher the chance that they get excited about what you are telling.”

I think that 98 % of blogs do the same. They tell about what others told, they summarize, they report. So here’s another reason for blogging: It’s a legitimate way to recycle the work of others, to use external knowledge to build your own authority. I think you can go even further: Because blogs usually report things that have been there before, they are a good means to also push new ideas: They are written, they are published, they are usually part of an already ongoing discussion – so the ideas should have some authority…

Is it again vanity? I call it strategy… Know the patterns that rule the world and deal with them.